Easy Stove-Top Pasteurizing - With Pics

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02fx4dude said:
I thought I would give this process a shot with some beer, as I've had some issues with over-carbonation months after bottling ( I keg and force carb as part of my bottling process). Anyway, I was sitting here with my first 6 bottles in the hot water, it's good thing I had the cover on the pot, as at least one bottle popped. I had heated water to 190 removed from the heat and the bottles were in for about 6 minutes. I don't know if the bottle broke or if the cap popped off. I think I'm going to let the whole pot cool of for awhile before I try to retrieve the remaining bottles.

OK, as I was typing this a second bottle went and popped, this one a bit more violent as it blew the lid right off the pot. I think I'm going to put this project on hold and maybe explore filtering options.

It sounds like plenty of others have been successful with this, any ideas what I'm doing wrong?
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Since the original post, there have been changes to the temp needed to properly pasteurize. You probably had the water too hot at 190. Read in to the thread a little bit, and that should help. Don't get discouraged. This process works well once you get it just right.
 
wilson42203 said:
Since the original post, there have been changes to the temp needed to properly pasteurize. You probably had the water too hot at 190. Read in to the thread a little bit, and that should help. Don't get discouraged. This process works well once you get it just right.
Click to expand...

OK, I'll have to go back then when I have time. I originally only read about 4 or 5 pages into the thread. I was hoping I wouldn't have to read the whole thread.

Thanks
 
what about pasturizing in quart jars with lids and rings? I pressure can in those suckers at 15 - 20lb for upwards of an hour. think that would be any safer?
 
I followed these instructions and now all my ciders are no longer carbonated…I used swing top bottles could this be the reason? I'm kind of irritated because it was my first batch and they were carbonated perfectly before I did this…any help would be appreciated.
 
Crock_it_out said:
I followed these instructions and now all my ciders are no longer carbonated…I used swing top bottles could this be the reason? I'm kind of irritated because it was my first batch and they were carbonated perfectly before I did this…any help would be appreciated.
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Sounds like you didn't give them long enough before pasteurizing. Make sure the carbonation level is at the amount you want before you pasteurize.

For my carbonation level, I bottle 1-2 plastic water bottles of cider, the rest in regular beer bottles, once the plastic water bottle is hard to squeeze (which takes 3-4 days) I pasteurize. It comes out slightly carbonated. In the future, I think once the water bottles are hard to squeeze, I'll start opening a cider a day, until it's at the level I want.
 
squegeeboo said:
Sounds like you didn't give them long enough before pasteurizing. Make sure the carbonation level is at the amount you want before you pasteurize.

For my carbonation level, I bottle 1-2 plastic water bottles of cider, the rest in regular beer bottles, once the plastic water bottle is hard to squeeze (which takes 3-4 days) I pasteurize. It comes out slightly carbonated. In the future, I think once the water bottles are hard to squeeze, I'll start opening a cider a day, until it's at the level I want.
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He said they were carbonated perfectly before he pasteurized. I had a similar result. My lemonades were carbonated right about where I wanted them and after pasteurization they seem to be less carbonated or almost no carbonation at all. Can the heat affect carbonation?
 
I used the soda bottle trick along with opening and drinking a bottle every couple days to see how the levels compared. And like I said it was carbonated perfectly the day I did the stove top…
 
Rockindaddy said:
He said they were carbonated perfectly before he pasteurized. I had a similar result. My lemonades were carbonated right about where I wanted them and after pasteurization they seem to be less carbonated or almost no carbonation at all. Can the heat affect carbonation?
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Yes. Heat Pasteurization can result in higher pressures released by the cap. Swing tops especially. I've lost carbonation in twist off bottles I've accidentally re-used.
 
I did this 3 days ago and it seems to have worked great. Thanks for this wright up and all the additional feedback.

I ended up doing this in my 60 liter brew kettle with the crab pot insert. The CP insert was raised off the bottom of the kettle by about 3" due to the ball valve and I also had a wire mesh insert inside of that holding the bottles about 6" off the bottom. I think this gave the whole pot great thermal insulation for the bottles.

I ended up preheating the bottles in a tub of hot tap water before putting them in the 170 degree kettle. I was able to fit 15 bottles at a time. After 15 minutes my 12oz bottles were 155 degrees. I did one batch of 22oz bottles that I left in for 20 minutes and were 150 degrees after that time.

I let sit out undisturbed over night. Put a couple in the fridge the following day. Tried one yesterday and it was mildly carbonated and delicious.

I think next time I might let them condition for a day or two longer just to get a little more carbonated. They conditioned for 5 days at about 60+ degrees. I think they lost a little carbonation somehow in the process.

Here are a few picks.



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Pappers_ said:
I've received a few messages asking for more info on the stove top pasteurizing method that I've adopted, so thought I would put up this quick tutorial with pics.

I began using this process to solve the problem of how to do a sparkling semi-dry (not bone dry) bottle conditioned cider. As you will see from other threads, this is a problem that perplexes many, and this process offers a solution that is simple and natural (no additions or chemicals needed). And the result is delicious.

So, you've made your cider (I keep it simple with juice, ale yeast and pectic enzyme) and have it in the carboy. When fermentation slows down, I start taking gravity readings and tastings. When its at the right level of sweetness/dryness (for me, that's about 1.010- 1.014), rack to bottling bucket with priming solution and bottle. Let the bottles carbonate and condition until the carbonation level is right - for me, that is usually about 1 week but for others it could be sooner. Start opening a bottle every two days or so, until you find that carbonation is at the right level. Warning - if the carbonation level is too high, if you have gushing bottles for example, do not pasteurize, the pressure will be too much for your bottles. Ok, now, we're ready for the point of this thread - pasteurizing.

Why pasteurize? Because at this point, you have a bottle of sparkling cider, with some residual fruit sugar left and yeast that is still working. If you just leave it be, you will likely end up with shrapnel rather than delicious sparkling cider. By gently heating the bottles, you will finish-off our yeast friends - they've done their job, they've performed admirably, but its time to say goodbye. Rather then pasteurize, you could cold-crash, but I don't have the refrigerator space for that and also can't give bottles away to other people using that method. I've found that the sparkling cider is very popular with my friends (and swmbo) and pretty much need to keep a constant pipeline of it going. The good news is its remarkably simple to make and takes much less time than brewing.

So, I start with about two cases of bottle conditioned cider, carbonated and ready to go.

pasteurize_cases_of_cider.jpg


Then, heat a large stock pot of water to 190 degrees F. A floating thermometer is a cheap tool that really adds convenience to this process.

pasteurize_thermometer.jpg


When the temperature reaches 190, turn off the heat and add the bottles carefully to the pot. For the size of pot shown, I usually add 6 or 7 bottles at a time, I don't want to "crowd" the pot too much and lower the temperature.

pasteurize_set_bottles_in.jpg


Put on the lid and let sit for ten minutes.

pasteurize_pot.jpg


pasteurize_ten_minutes.jpg


Continued in the next post
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Can I use this method for PET bottles?
 
I think there are previous posts where plastic bottles have melted or deformed. I wouldn't use plastic.

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buzzno said:
I think there are previous posts where plastic bottles have melted or deformed. I wouldn't use plastic.

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Click to expand...

Yeah I thought was the case, anyways I'm sure I'll be fine as I didn't prime. I was meaning to make a still cider but apparently I bulk carbonated my batch when I topped up secondary with AJ. Since then it has been 12 days and had stopped bubbling. Just when I was racking into my bottles it had had a bit of carb. If anything I will keep an eye out on the PETs and release it as needed.
 
Does this effect the alcohol content at all? (This may have been asked/answered somewhere in this thread, but I didn't see it.)
 
While most evaporated alcohol will condense back into the cider at some point, the boiling point of ethanol is about 173F; the inside of the bottles is unlikely to reach this temperature during the process so the alcohol will be where it was.
 
d00b said:
Yeah I thought was the case, anyways I'm sure I'll be fine as I didn't prime. I was meaning to make a still cider but apparently I bulk carbonated my batch when I topped up secondary with AJ. Since then it has been 12 days and had stopped bubbling. Just when I was racking into my bottles it had had a bit of carb. If anything I will keep an eye out on the PETs and release it as needed.
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If anyone is curious, don't bother trying to pasteurize anything in PETs.
I was curious, so I tossed my PET tester in with the pasteurizing bottles. at a max temp of 150F there was no deformation, but the bottle had previously been cracked to check carbonation and FG.

However, the Cider picked up a definite off flavour from the plastic. Not bad enough to make you pour it down the drain from the flavour, but a definite off flavour, which means something was going coming out of the plastic and leaching into the booze. Back away from the pasteurizing bath slowly, and keep your PETs in the fridge.
 
I back sweetened some ginger beer and want to kill the yeast to prevent any issues with sloppy storage down the line.

I am putting my bottles in a lobster pot and filling it with water. There is a probe thermometer in the middle of the pot. I am putting this in the oven at 170 and letting it rise to 145 where I will turn it off. The temperature is rising very slowly, about 1 degree every 7 - 10 minutes so I believe the probe is representative of whats happening in the bottles. If I just turn the oven off and leave everything in there will I have effectively killed the yeast?

I thought of going this route because I could use the SWMBO's turkey roaster (which is used once a year) to put an entire 3 gallon batch of bottles in and do them all at one time.

Thanks
 
Followed OP's instructions and worked great. Did two batches of 8 bottles in 30 minutes.

What do you do about sediment in the bottles? Mine have quite a bit of sediment. Will that hurt shelf life?
 
The sediment is the yeast, which settles to the bottom of the bottle. There is nothing to be done about it, its a fact of life for any bottle conditioned beer or cider. Just pour somewhat carefully and leave the last 1/4 inch or so in the bottle. The yeast won't hurt you if you pour it out and drink, but it will make the cider cloudy and more, well, yeasty.
 
Confused. Is potassium sorbate kills the yeast how does carbonation occur? Or are you not adding sorbate? The boiling stops the reaction? So backsweeten and bottle and check for carbonation levels in a few days? When carbonation is correct......boil?
 
After reading this entire thread....the one thing that I see has rang true. The folks that bottle with a higher reading (still active fermentation) are much much much more likely to see a bottle bomb than the folks that let it dry out to say a 1.02 level and backsweet. Seems the higher the number....the shorter the window of gushers...(some as low as 9 hours) Long story short....my theory tells me unless you do not have a day job...the safest bet would be to let it dry out a bit. Pappers seems to have this down pretty good...but newbies like myself should be careful starting out.....
 
It may have been in this thread...and if I missed it I apologize...but it sounds like we want to leave two inches of headspace on these when bottling? Is this correct?
 
I have been lurking this forum for the past 2 months, brewed my first batch of beer 4.5 weeks ago (just drank my first few a couple days ago), and 1 week after I started my American Amber Ale, I started this cider. This place is a gold mine of information, and is why I decided to try to carbonate my first cider.

Now lets see if I get an answer before complete paranoia sets in ;)

I have just bottled 12 1 litre swing top bottles, 6 12 oz bottles (capped), and a 12 oz water bottle. I have been keeping an eye on my cider for the past week in regards to taste/gravity. Today it tasted great right where it was at (alittle sweet, but I wanted my first batch sweet) sitting at 1.015ish. So I just bottled maybe 2 hours ago.

The thing that has me worried is that the 12 oz water bottle is already "pressurized". It's still squeezable, not completely hard (that's what she said), but I don't want to wake up in the morning to a mess.

Do I have anything/much to worry about?
 
JoshWithrow said:
I have been lurking this forum for the past 2 months, brewed my first batch of beer 4.5 weeks ago (just drank my first few a couple days ago), and 1 week after I started my American Amber Ale, I started this cider. This place is a gold mine of information, and is why I decided to try to carbonate my first cider.

Now lets see if I get an answer before complete paranoia sets in ;)

I have just bottled 12 1 litre swing top bottles, 6 12 oz bottles (capped), and a 12 oz water bottle. I have been keeping an eye on my cider for the past week in regards to taste/gravity. Today it tasted great right where it was at (alittle sweet, but I wanted my first batch sweet) sitting at 1.015ish. So I just bottled maybe 2 hours ago.

The thing that has me worried is that the 12 oz water bottle is already "pressurized". It's still squeezable, not completely hard (that's what she said), but I don't want to wake up in the morning to a mess.

Do I have anything/much to worry about?
Click to expand...


I have done a lot of reading on this. Two things that I have learned...

1. They say to NOT use a water bottle as it is a different (thinner) plastic.

2. I have seen ranges that carbed in as little as 9 hours...this too is the part that scares me on this process.

I have three 20 ounce soda bottles sitting to use...hopefully next week. I am going to ferm mine dry then back sweeten. I read that we should take the pop bottles...push a dent in the top side then seal the lid with the dent. Was told this will give a little more help in knowing where we are at carb wise. I would watch your water bottle real close....and if you are real worried....pop the top on one of your ciders. Better safe than sorry...let us know how it goes.
 
Just for clarity, the water bottle I'm using is one of the thick Aquafina bottles that you can get out of a vending machine. So I think (hope) I'm covered in that arena. I did not, however, pop a dent into the top. But it hasn't gotten noticeably "harder" in awhile, so I'm going to let the bottles sit in the dishwasher just in case (easier to clean up :D ) Seems the pressurization has a sort of "bell curve" in regards to how it feels in the bottle.

I am prepared to pasteurize and drink still cider (it's good, but I like my bubbles) this round, as I am planning my next cider to ferment dry (so this process would be alittle different for me) but wanted to see how this'd turn out. I just started getting nervous lol. I have plenty of test bottles (the 12 oz capped), so no worries there.

Thanks for the input!
 
Pappers
Awesome thread I'm new to cider and am making it a very sweet carbed cider this will have risidual sugar due to the
Amount of sugar I used anyhow I'm not using priming sugar and half leter swing tops with a soda bottle to check cabonation thanks for the thread and I will post my findings in about a week

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So I am doing this right now and about half of the bottles have started to leak had from the caps. I assume this isn't normal, but what can I do about it?
 
I will be bottling and back sweetening my cider this week. I mainly have stubby bottles to put it in (boulevard) and I'm slightly concerned about the caps staying on during pasteurization. Does anyone have experience with these kind of bottles.


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I had some boulevard tank 7 recently and didn't think the bottle lip area was weird. Can you post a pic of one from the side?


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They have a pretty shallow lip. I've bottled beers in them, those are fine, but I'm afraid about the added pressure of pasteurization.ImageUploadedByHome Brew1394383339.688598.jpg


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That is shallow. With a press style capper that can do corks and whatnot I think you would be fine. With the hand capper most people have, I don't think I would pasteurize it myself. When I do shallow lip bottles I cap it and rotate 90 degrees then cal it again to make sure I got a seal on the shallow lip.


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JoshWithrow said:
I have been lurking this forum for the past 2 months, brewed my first batch of beer 4.5 weeks ago (just drank my first few a couple days ago), and 1 week after I started my American Amber Ale, I started this cider. This place is a gold mine of information, and is why I decided to try to carbonate my first cider.

Now lets see if I get an answer before complete paranoia sets in ;)

I have just bottled 12 1 litre swing top bottles, 6 12 oz bottles (capped), and a 12 oz water bottle. I have been keeping an eye on my cider for the past week in regards to taste/gravity. Today it tasted great right where it was at (alittle sweet, but I wanted my first batch sweet) sitting at 1.015ish. So I just bottled maybe 2 hours ago.

The thing that has me worried is that the 12 oz water bottle is already "pressurized". It's still squeezable, not completely hard (that's what she said), but I don't want to wake up in the morning to a mess.

Do I have anything/much to worry about?
Click to expand...


I have done exactly the same as you however is was still fermenting at a reasonable rate and also my water bottle (which originally contained fizzy water) is now hard.
How did yours go in the end?

I stopped fermentation at 1010 after an og of 1065. Bottle 1gallon with 6 teaspoons of primer and after just 24 hours of bottling I opened one to try it and it was like opening a bottle of champagne. So had to open all bottles to release gas!
However the last batch I did was identical procedure but with beer yeast rather than wine and it was just a tingle rather than a fizz. Very flat.
Possibly the yeast determines how long you should leave it priming for so beware!
I did have a taste and it was very nice though! So hopefully it will recarb itself!
 
I did my first pasteurization last night and think it went pretty well.

However, I did end up with one "bomb" (pretty low-key, it popped the bottom off the bottle and I ended up with two perfect pieces). I'm not complaining about losing one bottle - it just seems so bizarre to me that one bottle, which was treated the same as the others would be a bomb, but no others. Thoughts? Was there maybe a flaw in the bottle itself? This was my first time using these reclaimed bottles (Corona long necks with the labels removed).
 
sparkshooter said:
I did my first pasteurization last night and think it went pretty well.

However, I did end up with one "bomb" (pretty low-key, it popped the bottom off the bottle and I ended up with two perfect pieces). I'm not complaining about losing one bottle - it just seems so bizarre to me that one bottle, which was treated the same as the others would be a bomb, but no others. Thoughts? Was there maybe a flaw in the bottle itself? This was my first time using these reclaimed bottles (Corona long necks with the labels removed).
Click to expand...

I would assume it had a flaw or micro fracture before you used it. That is why no commercial breweries reuse bottles anymore with the cost of new so low for them.

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So has anyone done this successfully in a cooler?


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brewski09 said:
I would assume it had a flaw or micro fracture before you used it. That is why no commercial breweries reuse bottles anymore with the cost of new so low for them.

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Click to expand...


Amazing how low the cost of new bottles is to breweries while how high it is to home brewers.


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MarkKF said:
Amazing how low the cost of new bottles is to breweries while how high it is to home brewers.


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Click to expand...


It's all about volume. Try buying 10,000 at a time and I bet you score a sweet deal too.


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